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Wellsprings

Metapontum

A prosperous Greek colony on the Gulf of Taranto in southern Italy where Pythagoras spent his final years, making the town a lasting shrine of the Pythagorean brotherhood.

Metapontum through the eras

Archaic Age

Settled by Achaean Greeks in the seventh century BCE, Metapontum grew wealthy on the grain of its fertile coastal plain—so much so that it stamped its coins with an ear of barley. That prosperity drew Pythagoras of Samos late in his life: when anti-Pythagorean violence drove him from nearby Croton, he withdrew here, where tradition holds he died around 495 BCE. The townspeople long revered his house as a sanctuary of Demeter, and Metapontum remained a stronghold of the Pythagorean way of life and its mysticism of number.

Classical Age

Through the fifth and fourth centuries Metapontum endured as a center of the scattered Pythagorean communities of Magna Graecia, preserving their teachings even as the brotherhood was persecuted elsewhere in southern Italy. Its name stayed bound to the Pythagorean legend, and writings circulated under Pythagorean authority kept the memory of the master's last home alive long after the city itself declined under pressure from native Italic peoples and the wars of the region.

Teachers who lived here

Works composed here

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